The Ancients - Origins of Carthage

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Famed as one of Rome’s fiercest enemies, the city of Carthage was one of the jewels of the ancient Mediterranean world. Situated on the coast of North Africa on the tip of what is now Tunisia, it first rose to prominence as a Phoenician colony. But how did this once fledgling outpost rise to claim it’s ancient pre-eminence? In this episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes is once again joined by Dr. Eve MacDonald to explore the origins of this most famous of ancient cities and tell the story of how Princess Dido of Tyre journeyed across the seas to found the future home of Hannibal, bane of Rome.This episode was produced by Elena Guthrie and Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan Lonergan. Scriptwriter: Andrew Hulse Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Her palace was the first thing waits alone for the Queen of Carthage. Her palace was the first thing he saw from the prow of his ship. As dusk fell, the hill of Carthage was picked out like a flaming crown. And the palace was the jewel at its peak. Like something out of a dream.

In the hill's shadow, gentle waves lap at a bustling port. Towering tenements reach almost to the shore. It could be a haven, and Aeneas is in desperate need of one. Squeezed into his ship's hold are the last remnants of Troy, those families lucky enough to escape the devastation. those families lucky enough to escape the devastation. They are destined to found a new city, Rome. But their wanderings have felt endless. First Aenea, then Ortega, now Pergama, now Sicily. At each port, the exiles have met with suspicion, mistrust, even violence.

When they have been shown hospitality, it has been short-lived. And so that is why he goes to the palace of Carthage alone. That is why he asks the muses to tell him of this queen, Dido. It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are exploring the origins and rise of one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean world, Carthage, home of famous figures such as Dido the Queen, Hanno the Explorer, and of course, Hannibal, Bane of Rome. Now, as with the origins of many great ancient cities, Carthage's early history, well, it's one strongly intertwined with mythology. So to kick off the episode, we have a retelling of Carthage's foundation myth, how Dido, princess of Tyre, fled her home

in the eastern Mediterranean, ventured west with her followers in search of pastures new, and ultimately outwitted a local king to found Carthage in what is today Tunisia. Following this, we have an interview with leading Carthage historian Dr. Eve MacDonald from the University of Cardiff. A good friend of the podcast, Eve explains the archaeology and the literature that has revealed a striking amount about Carthage's early history, some of it pretty infamous indeed. Did early Carthaginians practice child sacrifice, or is that later fiction invented by the Romans? Is there any archaeological evidence for it at all?

Well, listen on to find out. I really do hope you enjoy, and to kick off the episode, here's the myth of how Carthage was founded. The words of the Muses' song are winged. A great flock of seabirds, of cormorants. Though they may roost in Carthage, their story is a far-flung migration. It begins on the other side of the Mediterranean, amid the docks and wharves of Tyre. A ship is weighing anchor there. Dido's ship. Her brother, Pygmalion, has just been crowned king, and his first act is assassination.

Dido's husband, Acherobus. is assassination. Dido's husband, Acheribus. The murder of the richest man in Tyre is an easy way for Pygmalion to fill the royal coffers. And now Dido's only choice is to set sail and flee. But she does not flee alone. Squeezed into the ship's hold with Acheribus's gold are 100 of the foremost families of Tyre. They have all chosen exile with her, lest they too should suffer the consequences of Pygmalion's avarice. So where next do the muses take their song? How long do those winged words flit about the sails or perch atop the mast? Longer than the priestess cares to remember.

Years. First Cyprus, then Crete, now Pylos, now Sicily. At each port, the exiles are met with suspicion, mistrust, even violence. When they are shown hospitality, it is short-lived. With each departure, the ship, once so weighed down with passengers and gold,

rides higher and higher in the water. Rations, repairs, bribes. By the time they reach North Africa, there is little more than a single chest of the caribous's gold left. Can you imagine their relief when they see it? That flaming crown upon the horizon. The hill crest caught in the setting sun, like something out of a dream. In the hill's shadow, gentle waves break against golden sand. Grasses that reach almost to the shore. But this haven is no uncharted land. No sooner have they docked than Dido is forced

to tackle the avarice of another king, Iarbas. He knows of their desperation. These exiles from Tyre, he can smell it, the tang of salt baked in the sun. So of course he demands a price for his hospitality. A fifth of their gold merely to remain docked. But Dido is no fool. She knows his levies will only grow more extortionate. So she hatches a plan. She has her attendants set out a place to parley on the beach. The hide of an ox to cover the sand. A canopy overhead to keep away the sun,

and the last chest of her gold to invite Iarbus's interest. We do not wish merely to dock, O king. We wish to settle. How much to buy a portion of land? Iarbus insists it will be more than she could ever offer. Are you so sure? Dido replies, flashing a playful grin. Take the size of this hide on which we sit. How about a chest of gold for each tract of land that this hide can cover? It is too rich an offer to turn down. Iarbus can only imagine the wealth that must weigh down that ship in the bay.

But when it comes time to pay, Dido hands over just the one chest. You think to settle 100 families on just the one scrap of land, the king barks, gesturing at the hide. And Dido nods. barks, gesturing at the hide. And Dido nods. She has one of her attendants take a knife and begin to work the animal's skin, moving the blade in the most delicate of strokes. One pass across the hide and he cuts away a strip so fine it is little more than a membrane, little more than a film, little more than the skin of a bubble. Then he does the same again. Before the next day dawns, Dido's attendants have laid out thousands of the strips, enough to cover not only the whole beach, but the hill too. The new city. They come to call it in the language of Tyre, Carthage. The Muses bring their story to a close,

but Aeneas continues to hear their singing, their dancing, their playing of the lyre and the flute. It echoes faintly about the palace halls. Aeneas follows the sound to a balcony, one that looks down upon the hill, the city and all the coast, the whole of Carthage in a single vista. Another sister of the Muses stands there, another story. Her audience is a woman and as sure as Aeneas knows day from night, he knows her for the Queen of Carthage, Dido. She turns at the sound of Aeneas' steps. She sees the muses who accompany him too, and she flashes a playful grin. What song did they sing for you? Aeneas asks. The story of a wanderer, Dido answers. One who will come to found a great city. And for you,

the story of a wanderer, Aeneas echoes. But one who has already founded hers. Eve, such a pleasure to have you on the podcast, as always. Thank you, Tristan. Pleasure to be here. We've talked about Sassanians a lot in the past, but we've also talked a bit about Carthage in the past too. And now we're going to go back to Carthage and particularly the earlier history, the origins of Carthage, because so much of our attention on Carthage does seem to be after it's become this great power. But the story of its early history and its rise is just as interesting,

if a bit more murky and mysterious. Absolutely. I mean, the beginnings and the foundations of Carthage are just fascinating for how we understand the whole development of the Mediterranean as a sort of place of big cities and big powers and empires. And Carthage is such a key part of that. So its very origins tell us about the origins of all the classical civilizations really in the Mediterranean. And I always think that deserves a lot of history. And plus, there's been so much new work done there too, and done all over the Mediterranean. And we have much better scientific dating and all that for it. So time to tell a new story.

Time to tell a new story. And the word story, so when looking at sources for this very early part in the story of Carthage, how much mythology is there? There always seems to be so much myth around the foundations of these big cities of ancient history. There are these stories of especially cities that are founded as colonies almost have the obligatory foundation myth to go along with them to tell us about the belief in the identity of the city for those people who founded it, at least. Now, whether or not that's what we have in knowledge and understanding of early Carthage is true or not is a matter of much debate, which I figure we'll talk a little bit more during this time. But yes, absolutely. We don't know a lot about the early period in Carthage,

but we do have much better archaeological evidence, as I said, for the early foundations. And we also have myths and tales written about by later sources that tell us these amazing sort of epic stories of the beginnings of Carthage. So those two things come together. And what's been really interesting in the last 10 or 15 years is the fact that we sometimes didn't believe the historical sources that we have from the Roman period. And our new dating actually seems to give us a little bit more faith that they weren't entirely making everything up. That's what's interesting, I think. Well, let's explore this. First off, then, what is the foundation myth for Carthage?

So as far as we understand the foundation myth of Carthage, and we have to remember that this comes from non-Carthaginian sources, and so this isn't what the Carthaginians said about themselves. But it is that Carthage was founded by a woman. And she came from the city of Tyre. And Tyre is in southern Lebanon today, and was a place where people spoke the Phoenician language. And the woman who we know of as Dido was called in Greek, Alyssa. And in the Tyrian language, she was called Elishat. And so we know that this woman came to Africa and founded the city of Carthage. And myths and stories tell us that this happened in the 9th century BC. And she came from Tyre because of a civil conflict in the city. Her brother was a man who was named Pygmalion. And we know about Pygmalion from the Tyrian kings list. So we know that he existed.

know about Pygmalion from the Tyrian kings list, so we know that he existed. And her husband had been the chief priest of the great temple of Melkart at Tyre, so he was a religious figure. And her brother kills her husband, and she flees the city of Tyre, taking with her sacred objects from the temple. And we think with a group of nobles around her, goes off and founds a new city on the coast of Africa. So that's one of the origin stories of Carthage itself and where she came from. Yeah, so that's one of the ways in which this story is told. We do know that she's from Tyre. That much is true. The rest of it, how Dido, which is of course a Latin name, and Elishat becomes Dido and what, the word itself is thought to mean wanderer in Latin and be connected to this idea of a wandering woman in the Mediterranean. So there's wonderful sort of folklore embedded in the story of Dido. And how do they choose of all places, the site of Carthage?

So there's a couple of things about the site of Carthage itself. First of all, Carthage sits on the north coast of Africa. It's in Tunisia today. It's very close. It's about 14, 12 kilometers from the city of Tunis, just at that little tip of Tunisia that juts out right into the middle of the Mediterranean. So it's an incredibly strategic and important point of contact if you're traveling across the Mediterranean, east or west, north or south. The place that Carthage is, is a really key part of that location, the geography itself. So that's probably why she went to Carthage. But there are other cities already founded by Phoenician speaking peoples in that region, very, very close. And this is the 9th century BC. It's a time when

Phoenician speaking peoples from the cities of Tyre, of Sidon, of Beirut, and Byblos are spreading out across the Mediterranean. And so they're connecting themselves like a web really from port to port to port all the way across the Mediterranean from the very east, all the way to the very west, outside the pillars of Heracles to the Atlantic coast as well, down the coast of Africa. And if you want to return through the Mediterranean, going along the north coast of Africa is the safest way for a ship to do that. And so putting a foundation of a port right there in that middle space of the Mediterranean makes a lot of sense. I mean, just from a pure strategic point of view, if you're sailing these waters. So that's probably why. Now, why does she go to Carthage in the myths and stories, we're not really told exactly why she's driven to Carthage

itself to that location. So we assume there are already these existing foundations. Part of the tale of Dido, the early tales that we have, is that they stop first at the site of Kittion, which is in Cyprus and the southern coast of Cyprus. And there was a great temple to the goddess Aphrodite there. And that goddess Aphrodite is syncretized with the Near Eastern goddess Astarte. And we're told that the expedition picks up women from the temple and takes them with them. And these women are prized across the Mediterranean all the way through into Roman times as very worthy wives. And so they pick up these women to take them off to found this new city. And when you think about what that means in terms of a colonial intention, I mean, there's an intention there that underpins

not just fleeing in a mad rush out of the city, but an expedition with a colonial intention to go found a new city on the north coast of Africa. So leaving Tyre and founding a new city in Africa in the 9th century, that's the foundation myth with Dido at its centre. The big question, how much does the archaeology corroborate, support this foundation story? So the foundation of the new city, and we keep calling it the new city because that's literally, of course, what Carthage means. Carth, Hadash, in the Phoenician tongue, just means new city. And probably in the same way that we call New York, New York from Old

York, it's like this idea, a new tyre, is the idea of the meaning of the word. And so the foundation in the stories in the Roman sources that we have takes place in the 9th century BC. And in fact, I think the date specifically is 814. So it's a very, very specific date that we're given in the Roman sources. And a lot of the later Roman sources spend time calculating, you know, the event around the early Iron Age. The archaeology tells us, and this is new archaeology, in the last 20 years, there's been major excavations at a site called Bir Masuda, which is a multi-phase have at Carthage that literally goes from early Christian Basilica all the way through to the very, very first foundations of the city. So it's so interesting to have the whole sequence of events from the very beginning to the last phases of the city. And the dates from the bottom of those trenches, the radiocarbon dates concur of the 9th century BC. So for a long

time, people thought, no, that's too early. Couldn't have been. But yeah, no, we actually now have radiocarbon dates that confirm that the later 9th century BC is when the city was founded. That's amazing. Especially when you consider the terrible end that, you know, Punic Carthage suffers from the Romans, that you can go that far back from the archaeology. From other archaeological excavations and from the surviving literature, for those early inhabitants of New Tyre, Carthage, do we know much about the surrounding landscape? Do we know who else lived in that area of North Africa, the other settlements and so on?

Yeah. So one of the stories of Dido is that she shows up at the place that Carthage now exists, and there's a local chieftain there. And she negotiates with this local chieftain to take some land from him. And she negotiates for the amount of land that could be covered by an ox hide is the size. And she, because she's tricky, Venetian, Carthaginian, you can tell this is a story told by others, cuts this ox hide into the thinnest possible strip, like think a thread, and basically is able to wind this ox hide into this big, long area

that surrounds what we call today the Birsa Hill in Carthage, which was the center of the ancient city. So our first encounters between Dido and local inhabitants takes place there in that very beginning of the origin story. And those would be Numidian people who lived in this region. They're called Libyans in the ancient sources. Today, we call them Amazigh people. They're the Berber people who have been indigenous to North Africa throughout this whole period. That's part of the origin myth.

But we also have two other early foundations of Phoenician cities very close to Carthage, just a little bit up to the north at a place called Utica. And that means old. So we have new and then we have the old city. And also around the corner, almost on the Mediterranean coast is a city that we will is berserk today is the modern city Hippo-Akra or Hippo-Dyreitis. It's got a number of different names. And those are two of the other cities that were founded. We think there's got a number of different names. And those are two of the other cities that were founded. We think there's been a lot of really interesting archaeology at Utica done, and they also have very early dates that they have a well, I think that they date to the 9th

century BC too. So we know in the very beginning of the Iron Age Mediterranean, there are a number of Phoenician colonies in this region. So the Carthaginians are interacting with these cities as well. One of the things that we think of is that Utica was founded first, and then because it's at the mouth of the river Bagradas or Majurda today in Tunisia, in the modern country, that it was silted out. And so it wasn't functioning very well as a port. So perhaps they founded Carthage as a new city because their old city's port wasn't as functional as it should be.

So that's one of the things. So you have local indigenous Numidian peoples, and you have Phoenician-speaking peoples from the eastern Mediterranean all engaging in these cities. And they really are mixed populations, even at the early period, as far as we can tell. Do we think Carthage, with its advantageous position on the Mediterranean coast and with the Phoenician trade network stretching so far at that time in the early first millennium BC, do we think this really benefits Carthage in that as a result,

it grows quite quickly as a settlement? So what's interesting is that we don't see this explosion of growth in the archaeology immediately, certainly. It's a tough slog for a lot of these cities, these early colonial foundations in the 9th. I mean, we think of the 800s BC. So we see the foundations and we see the beginnings of rural agricultural development, and we see trade in contact. But it's not super wealthy in the material culture by any means at this point. It's really probably, it takes, it seems to take a couple of hundred years before you really get urban growth, big urban growth at

Carthage. And that's also a time when you have much more expansive foundation by other peoples in the Mediterranean as well. So you have more Greeks coming west and things. So the Mediterranean is getting more crowded, but there is a sort of steady growth. And there's been a lot of work done on the ceramic importation and how much locally made ceramics there are and how much ceramics are imported. And if you think about the importation being a sign of wealth and growth and trade, that's something that is present, but not hugely developed probably for a couple of hundred years. So it's an outpost really, we think at the very beginning, or its initial period anyway. An outpost indeed. And it's also never guaranteed. We always think of Carthage now

as being that dominant power in that area of the world in antiquity. However, do we know how Carthage does become the top dog? And it's not the Numidians, it's not Utica, it's not Hippowacra, that it is Carthage. Yeah, I know, because the other two are very close. So they also have the geographical advantages that Carthage has. So if we go back to our foundation myth, I think there's something embedded in this idea of the princess and this elite foundation, perhaps at Carthage, and the new city being something that seems to be maybe from its very original construction, something a little bit different from the other foundations, the other perhaps trading emporia and outposts.

It's also hugely advantageous in its connection to agricultural land around it. Carthage is really richly embedded with agricultural land. And in this region that is inside the city walls, for a lot of it, the Megara is an amazingly productive region. So we have the natural wealth. And we also have, it is better protected than the other two, certainly. It's tucked underneath a little peninsula, almost an island, almost in antiquity. And so it's a safer place for ships to anchor.

And I think that idea of the safety of it makes it more attractive. So perhaps it's getting more people coming through in that way. So Carthage bit by bit seems to outgrow its neighbors. But it's not really until we see upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean that we get perhaps more growth at Carthage itself. And when we think about the Ahumanid Persians, and their takeover of the all the way through to the Mediterranean coast in the sixth century, that seems to be when we see a little bit of a shift in the growth in Carthage. And perhaps, we also see a change in its government. And this is very speculative, where we up until maybe the 6th or 5th century, we think Carthage was a type of monarchy, much like Rome. But we don't have evidence like we do for Rome for that period as well.

And then we know it develops into a republic. So that as well seems to be happening over the course of that period where there's a lot of upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean. It makes sense. of that period where there's a lot of upheaval in the Eastern Mediterranean, it makes sense. More people may have moved to the West, moved to safer places, moved to a different area. So that's probably when we see Carthage as its own entity by the late 6th century. Let's explore that. What is this upheaval in the Eastern Mediterranean that contributes to the rise and growth of Carthage that we think? Well, first there's the Achaemenid conquest of the old Phoenician cities. So the Assyrians had always been quite powerfully important, but when the

Achaemenids take over that whole region, it changes and shifts the dynamic, both for the good and the bad in many ways in Carthage's sense, because at one level, Tyre, the home mother city, now becomes connected to this huge Achaemenid empire, literally the world's first superpower. For the first time, really, the Mediterranean is connected all the way through in one power to India and Afghanistan in a way that it hadn't been before. So you can see growth. You can see economic growth and more trade and development.

But also, Tyre loses its autonomy in that period, and it loses this idea of itself as a city-state of its own. And I think that shifts the dynamic. And, of course, that'll happen even more so, again, when Tyre's conquered in the 4th century by Alexander the Great too. So there's a couple of different phases where Tyre losing some of its autonomy seems to benefit Carthage. Going before that with Tyre, let's say before it is conquered by the Persians, the archaeology at Carthage, does it show any active links between

the two when going back and paying homage to the mother city or is that kind of invisible from the archaeological record? Oh, I think there's no question. There's a really important link in a number of different ways. Religiously, as far as we can tell, because we don't have very much of the early archaeology of Carthage, we really have a few sites that go all the way through. As we were saying, we don't always know exactly what the makeup of the city would have been. But we are told, certainly in sources, that the Carthaginians always paid a tithe to Tyre. So they would pay one-tenth of their GDP, I guess, and take that back to the temple of Melkart at Tyre. And of course, Melkart is an

important patron god in Tyre, and in Carthage as well, and further west in the Mediterranean too. So Melkart links those ideas. We also have some very interesting ideas and development with pottery. We see a lot of Levantine pottery coming into the city in this period. And we see shifts in the way houses are built too. Just in this period when Tyre, in the 6th century, now whether it's a coincidence, there's nobody telling us that this is what happened. A whole bunch of emigrants came from Tyre and lived in Carthage. But they changed the shape of the houses as well that are being built in this period. So it may be that new people are moving into the city in this period,

and that changes the dynamic quite a lot as well. So the archaeology is really interesting because it never gives us that specific narrative tale, but it tells us things are changing in that period too. And what's the basis of this growth in Carthage's power, particularly following, as you highlighted, this turmoil in the eastern Mediterranean and the Achaemenids taking over places like Tyre? One of the things that the Phoenician cities are famous for, of course, are their ships and their navies, and Carthage continues that tradition. So Carthage has an active and important merchant-type navy, as far as we can tell, or a navy.

And in the 6th century, there seems to be directly related to the Achaemenid takeover of Phocaea, which is in the Turkish coast today, is an Asia minor. People from the Phocis move from the Asia minor, and they settle at a place in Corsica called Aleria. They also settled the city of Marseille at this point as well. So we have to try and picture the western central Mediterranean, Carthage up to Sicily, the coast of Italy up to southern Gaul, Corsica and Sardinia, you know, making this circle of influence. and Etruscan cities, states from northern Italy. And the Carthaginians and the Etruscans seem to ally together against some Greeks who are disrupting shipping, is how it's called.

And these are people from the site of Elaria who are these Phocaeans. So the Achaemenids directly impact movement of Greeks into the western Mediterranean. And this is our first indication of real conflict between different groups in the Western Mediterranean as well. Because up until that point, we seem to see quite a lot of peaceful cohabitation, lots of trade and contact between different groups. But it's really in the 6th century, just at the time that there's more upheaval in the East, that we see more conflict in the West. But this is really interesting in a certain way, because Carthage, if you're mentioning Corsica and the fighting the Greeks around that Corsica area, Alalia, they're going far beyond North Africa now using that dominance, that prowess of their ships, sailing far and wide.

I mean, immediately my mind thinks of things like piracy as well. Do you think they probably engaged in that, that they were a threat in the seas of the Western Mediterranean. And that also helps them get dominance and more power in this area of the world. Well, Tristan, one person's pirate is another person's privateer. Let's be honest here. So everyone is engaging in piracy at this moment. Certainly, I would say. If we call it privacy, I wouldn't, I don't know. This is such an interesting problem. Because are they pirates? Not really. I mean, everybody seems to be disrupting shipping. Do they, other people call the Phoenicians and the Greeks pirates? Absolutely. Do, can we be pretty sure Phoenician speaking people called Greeks pirates? Yes, we know. So for example, Herodotus tells us about these Phoenicians at Euleria were the ones who settled there and disrupted the shipping.

They were looting and raiding the ships between Etruria and Carthage. So we assume that from this perspective, it's the Phocaeans who are the pirates. But then in other perspectives, certainly, I would assume the Carthaginians are. It's really interesting to tell. I mean, of course, I'm on the Carthaginian side of things, generally speaking. So I'm always willing to project the other people are the pirates, but no, of course, they were. Raiding was really common. And we have some later very clear examples where this is happening in the region where Sicilians are raiding Etruscan cities, the Pergi and these amazing gold tablets we have from this period from the Etruscan port

on the Italian coast that are written in Phoenician and Etruscan. And so we can see lots of contact, but we also read about raids and things like that. Coastal raiding is really important. We haven't really mentioned Sicily, which is a key factor in all of this, because there's no way the Carthage Indians could be going so far and wide unless they have very closely connected and allied ports in which they can operate out of. And this is Western Sicily and Southern Sardinia are a really important part of that network of Carthaginian allies. And we know that Carthage, or we know we're told that Carthage found its first colony of its very own. So the colony becomes a colonizer in the late 6th century, in the 6th century BC too. So, and that's on the island of Ibiza, which I think is very wise of them. Why don't we all go

to Ibiza? Yeah, go partying in Ibiza alongside Sardinia and Sicily. Well, let's focus in on Sicily then quickly before we move on, because the story of Carthage and Sicily is a fascinating one going all the way down to the Greeks and then the Romans. But do we know much about its earliest interactions with the island of Sicily and the Carthaginians really creating a strong presence on that island? Yes. And we do because they're so connected. And they're so connected, I mean, just today, the geographic closeness, the safety of navigating the seas are really important. Sicily is a little anchor, really, in very many ways. And that west coast of Sicily is very heavily influenced by Carthaginian culture. People argue about whether these are Carthaginian

or Phoenician foundations. I mean, are they coming directly from Tyre? Are they connected with Carthaginians? We don't know that for sure. But there are really important cities along the west coast and north of Sicily that are related to the Carthaginians. And they are Panormus or Palermo, the Drupana, which is today's Trapani, Lilibeum, which is Marsala. And then the one that was probably founded before that, which is Motia or Motia. And Motia is an incredible little island in a salt pan off the west coast of Sicily, very close to Marsala today, so just north. And it's an island city that was deeply connected to the Carthaginians and to the Phoenician culture, incredibly important for trade and contact. Beautiful place that had a sacred shrine to the god Baal over a spring,

so it had natural water. And we have to realize again about the foundation and the understanding how important it is to found well-placed cities. The Phoenician people understood that really well. So Motia is a really important port on that west coast of Sicily and a place to come and go from. There are incredible finds there.

And because it's an island today that has vineyards on it but it's been well excavated and you can go and visit it's really cool to see because it's got all these different aspects of a of a carthaginian styled city that we don't usually have access to so it's been really interesting to see the excavations there and the development of this idea of what it is they were it's an island that was connected to Sicily proper to the mainland by a causeway. So people could walk carts and horses and things out, walk across the water literally to Mozia itself. So it was, again, well protected, well protected from raiding, but also connected to Sicily. And Carthaginians had a lot of close connections with the Elimians,

who are an indigenous Sicilian people. There are different groups in Sicily before the Greeks and the Carthaginians arrive. And Thucydides tells us, we can't always believe everything Thucydides says, that the Venetians ruled all of Sicily and then the Greeks arrived and they settled only in the west of Sicily. People don't really believe that. They think that that actually might just be an exaggeration. But certainly from the very beginning of the historic concept of Sicily as a place, Carthage, Phoenician-speaking people are integrally connected to it.

Phoenician-speaking people are integrally connected to it. There was a very important temple to the goddess Aphrodite, who, as we've already talked about in Kittion, was known as Astarte. She was a mother goddess of some sort for the Elimean people, the indigenous Sicilian people, and the Carthaginians were very closely connected to that shrine as well. And then it becomes a key part in the Punic Wars, in the first Punic Wars, a place that's battled over between Romans and Carthaginians too. So Sicily is essential to Carthage, to their identity, to their prosperity. We see the very first Carthaginian coins being minted in relationship to Sicily, and it's when Carthaginian troops are operating

overseas, basically over in Sicily itself. So there's a really deep connection between the people there and the culture of Carthage. That strong cultural connection is amazing. And I love talking about Sicily because it has such a rich ancient history. One last thing before we go onto the Romans proper and early Carthaginian interactions with the Romans and also going back to the myth of Dido, you know what I'm going to be talking about there. However, just before that, going back to the archaeology of Carthage itself, let's say by the time it's created its own colonies, it's got this strong influence on Sicily and Ibiza and

Sardinia and so on and so forth. But from the surviving archaeology of Carthage itself, do we know much about how this city itself looked? I can imagine you're getting traders coming from all across the Mediterranean and further, but have we got any idea of an earlier Carthage and how majestic the city looked? So we have reports, of course, later reports that, you know, it was this beautiful city and it was incredibly sophisticated. And some of our very early archaeology does actually confirm a sort of high level of industrial sophistication. So there's evidence in some of the early excavations from early layers there

of crucible steel, very early crucible steel, that kind of idea. So myths and stories about the technological superiority of Phoenicians and Carthaginians when it comes to metalworking and things seem to be played out in some of our evidence. So that's really interesting. There were, as far as we know, seawalls that surrounded the city. There was temples up on the Bersa Hill. On the top of the hill, there were houses, multi-storied houses that lined the city of the hill. So you would be walking up a roadway up the hill to the top where one of the civic centers of the city were. And there were multi-storied houses there. We have elite housing on some of the other

regions, we think, and some of the other hillsides inside the city. It had a big public agora, as far as we know. A lot of this is being projected from later sources telling us, so it's not always sure if urbanization changed. But when Carthage is becoming a big urban center, we know that it had sophisticated ports. You would have arrived, you had a big public open spaces temples with gods and gold statues we're told so there's urban spaces we have really interesting information from some of our greek sources about some of the jobs that people did in the port so you know piloting in the port is a very important job obviously when you have big sophisticated ports and i think it's plato who tells us in his laws that there was a ban on drinking alcohol

if you were driving a boat, if you're trying to procreate, if you were one of the judges or one of the magistrates sitting in the courts and things like that, which is all pretty sensible in its own way, no drinking at that period. But yeah, so we have this interesting idea,

at least that develops by the fifth and fourth century of a very sophisticated, very multicultural, but also very much a Carthaginian city with its own Carthaginian traditions. And so there's a kind of a mix of identities there as various people and influences grow and ebb and change. And that's when we also see the government changing from the monarchy into a republic. So we know that it's ruled by two individuals who are called sufets, we think related to the Hebrew word for judge or shofetum. And that we also have early on in Carthage, a separation between the military and the civic government, which is something that later on in their history, people point to as perhaps one of the reasons why they're not as effective in the big wars they fight against Rome, which is quite

interesting to consider this idea that because the rabbin, the generals were separate from the civic administration, there wasn't a coordinated effort really. And we see that play out. And as you know, in some of our later events, when we're trying to coordinate big wars against Rome, it doesn't always come off. I must also ask about this more infamous legacy of Carthage that we have regularly today. And this is this idea of child sacrifice. Yes. Oh, it's such a fascinating and absolutely fundamental issue when we think about Carthage. There is a site at Carthage, and it's one of the oldest sites at Carthage, one of the most important sites at Carthage. It sits just near the ports,

and it goes from the very beginning of the city right through till the Roman destruction, and even beyond that, where the Romans found a shrine on the site itself. And it's a site where it was discovered in the 1920s. And what was discovered there were urns that were filled with the cremated remains of children and animals too, not always children. And also these were topped with dedicatory stele stones that were carved and also little sippy, they're called like little sort of almost pseudo temples. And this site was littered with these urns, with these deposits in them. And it's been a huge controversy since its discovery in the 1920s, so 100 years of controversy about whether this is a place where the Carthaginians deposited the remains of children that were sacrificed.

And this is something that the ancient sources have accused, some of the ancient sources accused the Carthaginians of doing, or whether this was a place where natural child mortality, which was very, very high in the ancient world, was commemorated. Whether this is a place where people put children who had been, you know, sacrificed to the great god Baal, or whether this was a place of deep sadness and mourning. And the debate rolls on, but new excavations have just taken place. And a lot of new assessment of the data has gone on. And I think that because the idea of child sacrifice, I mean, the Romans exposed their children.

This isn't, it's not that it wasn't terrible, but of course it would have been terrible to any family to have to do this. But the importance of the site and the place and its foundation in the city itself means that we can't ignore it. And it must have been more than one thing probably over the course of the whole evolution of the city. And that it's connected to this place that we call Topheth, that goes back to the Hebrew Bible, to the Old Testament, and goes back to accusations of the Canaanites, the Philistines and the Canaanites sacrificing their children. So it's a really interesting and very complex place. But the way that the sciences allowed us to understand that these are the remains of very, very young children, or even neonates now we know, and that it just sheer demographics alone means that the Carthaginian couldn't be mass sacrificing their children, especially in the early days of a

struggling colony. None of this really makes sense, but that there was some kind of child sacrifice at Carthage, variously over the history of its rule is probably more and more likely anyway. And thankfully for science and technology, we've been able to kind of work our way through to at least some consensus, but it's still such a controversial topic that it's really difficult to say exactly what went on. What we do know didn't go on was what a lot of the Roman sources, you know, mass sacrifice of children being rolled into this fire of the God's belly. Whatever happened there was absolutely sacred and absolutely fundamental to the people of Carthage too. And it was an

incredibly somber and important place in the origins of the city. So whatever happens there, and we'll know more and more, I think, as science continues, it's a really important place to consider when we're thinking about who the Carthaginians were. Absolutely. Well, let's talk about Rome as we begin to wrap up and go back to the figure of Dido. Because Eve, what is this well-known story that links Carthage and Rome through the figure of Dido? So exactly, the eternal figure of Dido and the memory that we have of Dido. I always think of Henry Purcell's opera, Dido and Aeneas. And there's a lament in that where we all say, Dido sings, remember me at the end. And it's exactly what we've done is

remember Dido through her interactions with Aeneas. And so the origins of Rome and the origins of Carthage are both somewhat contemporary and then deeply connected by the later events that leads to the destruction of Carthage. And in the third century, when the wars between Rome and Carthage start, we have evidence of the origin stories of the Romans being interwoven with the origin stories of Carthage. And this is how we get the story of Dido and Aeneas. So there are other versions of origin stories of Carthage that don't include Aeneas. So we know that it wasn't always part

of the origin of Carthage. But as it goes, as we're told, Dido, the beautiful young queen, is founding her city on the coast of Africa. And the young hero Aeneas, sailing off from a burning Troy, lands on the shores of Africa and takes refuge there and tells the beautiful queen, who is single, unmarried queen, all about his adventures with the Greeks and the Trojans. And the two fall in love and they interact. And then the gods get terribly upset because Aeneas, as we know, has another purpose in their plan, and that is to go off and found the Roman people.

And so Aeneas sails off, abandons Dido after he seduced her, leaving this woman queen, this single queen alone, and goes off and does his job and founds the Roman people. Dido commits suicide. She's shamed by this. And as she commits suicide, she hurls curses upon Aeneas and all his descendants and she conjures up some avenger for to avenge her the wrong that's been done to her that love hath no fury idea and that of course in the Roman mind turns out to be Hannibal. And it's all this idea. Now, these are all stories written down in much, much later in the first century by Virgil and the Aeneid, but they appear as early as the third century BC as well. And they become part of this idea of the justification for the Roman-Carthaginian wars, for the Punic

wars, for the destruction of Carthage. So it's really fascinating. And that's, of course, what's always resonated with us is this idea of weaving the destiny of these two cities together in myth and epic has been perhaps what has lasted the longest for us in terms of remembering Dido and remembering the stories of Carthage itself. But it really is this kind of later reconstruction of a way in which the two cities were interlinked. I mean, exactly, because as we're talking about Carthage's earlier history today, and it's fascinating how you mentioned how these two cities are, their origins are similar times, according to the myth. But the earliest interactions between

Rome and Carthage, do we know much about them? Are they enemies and always hostile or is it very different? Well, no, that's such a good point. No, in fact, we know because of Polybius, the Greek historian who writes the history of Rome. He gives us a list of all the treaties that have existed up to the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome. And one of them goes back to the period we were already talking about, the late 6th century BC. And that is what's so fascinating. So just at the very moment that we see Carthage expanding its influence and the Etruscans and the Carthaginians

allying together and Greeks, we also get, of course, the story of the Romans and the foundation of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. And the first treaty between Carthage and Rome dates to 509 BC, dates to the very foundation of the Roman Republic. And it's a treaty that outlines the sphere of influence between the two places. Now, in that treaty, there's no question that Carthage seems to have the more expansive room to maneuver and the more powerful partner in the treaty. But we have treaties all the way through to the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, and they are always allies until, really, until the third century BC. So it's really amazing. And we know other stuff. We know from stories that Carthaginian merchants and Romans back and forth between the two cities, there was a lot of contact and interaction, probably much more than actually the Romans have allowed us to believe because a lot of the history

of early Carthage was really taken by the Romans and then repurposed for Roman causes, like the story of Dido. It's a Roman story of Dido, whereas Dido existed before the Romans and then repurposed for Roman causes, like the story of Dido. It's a Roman story of Dido, whereas Dido existed before the Romans. What we really know about is the Roman version of her. It's the same thing with all the contact and trade between the two places too. So it's super interesting to think about allies becoming such enemies. It is super interesting, isn't it? How you can see parallels. Rome wants with the kings, get rid of their kings, there's the Republic. And although we don't know for sure with Carthage, has a monarchy, gets rid of it for Republic. If we finish on the figure of Dido, or the Phoenician

name of Dido, which I cannot quite pronounce, I'm just going to say Dido. But can we be sure, because all these stories around her, and I know there's another story of her death that she refuses to marry a local ruler. Can we be sure that there was a historical figure of Dido? I think, can we be sure? No. But I would say we can be certain that somebody connected to the Tyrian royal family was involved in the foundation of Carthage, I think is a pretty sure bet. And that it was a woman is tricky because when we're dealing with people's stories of others and enemies, using women is really common.

Feminizing the character of a place is very common way of sort of undermining their strength, their masculinity, their power. So we have to be a little careful of falling into these tropes that ancient sources are so commonly using. But Elishat and Pygmalion we know did exist, and we know that there was this period in Tyre. So I don't think it's completely outside the realm of possibility that a woman, a princess from Tyre was involved in the early foundation of the city, but it's almost impossible to be certain. So how's that? I would like to say yes. And then also say if they are based on a natural figure, that Phoenician princess that you highlighted right there from Tyre. Eve, on that note,

this has been absolutely brilliant, a massive topic. So great to have you on to talk all about it. Last but certainly not least, you have written a new book, or you are writing a new book, all about Carthage, which is called? Yes, yeah. We've got a new history of Carthage, a sort of hopefully accessible story of the whole city from its foundation to the end. And also we have a new book with Bloomsbury Press out that's on the archaeological history of Carthage. So it's about how the actual physical site of Carthage itself and why when you go there today as a tourist, for example, it looks the way it does and all the amazing sites that are included in that and some of which we haven't even got to touch on yet today. But yes, absolutely. So yeah, new books. For another episode, indeed. But it just goes for me to say thank you so much for

taking the time to come back on the podcast. A pleasure. Nice to see you. Thanks, Tristan. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Eve MacDonald talking through the story of Carthage's origins and its earlier history, how it rose to become this powerful city in the western Mediterranean, from being one of many cities on that northern Tunisian coast, to being one of the greatest enemies that the Romans ever faced. I hope you enjoy today's episode. Last things from me, if you have been enjoying The Ancients recently and you want to help us out, well, make sure that you are following, that you are subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen to The Ancients, whether that be on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or elsewhere.

It really helps us as we continue our infinite mission to grow the podcast and to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.